The Point Of No Return

FHIR R4, as you all know, is the first release with normative content. R4 will make it easier for CIOs to make investments, and to justify investments to their internal and external stakeholders. With R4, we have reached a point of no return, or, in IT jargon, of backward compatibility.

Over the last months, we have had many questions from users about the R4 release of our products: the API, Vonk, Forge and Simplifier. Our release policy is to wait for final publication of a FHIR version before implementing the corresponding release of our products. The new release of our products has been presented at the FHIR connectathon in Montreal, so we call this the Montreal Release. “Montreal” reflects the maturity of FHIR and will make it easier for implementers to take FHIR into production.

Simplifier now contains FHIR R4 snapshot generation and validation. The rewritten runtime engine results in half the load times. Forge has a brand new major release adding support for authoring SearchParameters, OperationDefinition and the long-awaited R4 support. The foundation of all of our tools, and of many, many out there, is the .NET API. The open source R4 library can be downloaded from NuGet or GitHub.

We know that a lot of people are waiting for the R4 release of Vonk. We hoped to release Vonk R4 at Montreal, however, we’re not satisfied with the quality: the update is not ready yet. This is better done right than fast.

If you want to learn more, join us at FHIR DevDays, June 10 to 12 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. Our dev teams will be there to provide tutorials and one-on-one guidance during the Meet & Code sessions. We’ll be wearing our yellow DevDays shirts.